Introduction of our teaching style in various IB Sciences

Introduction of our teaching style in various IB Sciences

Parents are understandably very concerned with their child’s progress in the IB. They want to make sure that their child is doing the best that they can and is on the right track to getting a top university offer.

To help parents and IB students, my partner and I have leveraged our expertise to start HKExcel IB expert before to provide top quality IB tuition. My partner and i were both high achievers in high school and I achieved 40/45 in the IB. We both believe that an effective method of learning and exam skills are vital to achieving top marks. We both believe that IB tutors can add tremendous value to students’ lives by accelerating their learning and improving their results.

When we started our business, we noticed that all other IB tutors or IB tutorial centres, did not provide specialised services for IB students. In fact, I was an IB student not too long ago and the tutors I had mostly did not use a very exam-oriented or systematic approach to help me ace the IB. Instead, my tutors typically would just answer my questions instead of using a proactive approach to teach me.

My partner and I both believe that the idealIB tutorshould be proactive in helping students improve. They should be able to clearly point out to students what are the key learning points and the most commonly asked exam question in each chapter. They should be able to teach exam skills that dramatically boost students’ scores. It is with this belief in mind that we started HKExcel.

Our science department have always been one of our strongest. Our exam-oriented approach have helped over a thousand students to score 6 or 7 in the IB sciences in the past 5 years. In this blog post, we would share our teaching style and methodology in the sciences subject.

IB Biology

Biology is one of the most highly demanded subjects for tuition. In IB Biology, especially for Biology HL, there are vast amounts of information to be memorised, and students feel like drowning.

The way we help students is to break down the syllabus for students into highly digestible bits. Then, we would teach them memorisation tricks to help them more easily retain the concepts they learn. Moreover, our IB tutors would use various aids to help students more easily understand the content. For example, our tutors often use visual aids and analogies to help students memorise complicated biology processes.

Memorising and understand concepts is the first step, but answering exam questions in an effective way is equally important. In IB Biology, there are short answer questions related to the syllabus concepts and also data response questions, where students need to analyse datas and answer related questions. Thus, our IB tutors in the Biology department are also focused on improving exam question answering techniques of our students. This includes learning how to pick up on the keywords in a question and how to tailor a response that would get full marks.

IB Chemistry

Chemistry is a difficult science subject that involves both memorisation of concepts as well as solving mathematical problems. Students need to understand a large amount of information and at the same time, be able to acquire problem solving skills.

In a typical Chemistry lesson at HKExcel, our IB tutor would first lay out and break down the key concepts for the students, followed by a demonstration on how to solve the most typical exam questions. Through the demonstration, our students would learn the most important exam question solving technique for that topic.

Then, our IB tutor would assign a series of mock IB exam questions for the student to attempt. Throughout this drilling process, our tutor can identify weaknesses or misunderstandings that the student have and correct them.

IB Physics

IB physics is the science that is most oriented towards problem solving and mathematics, and has the least emphasis on memorisation. Because of this, it is also the hardest science to ace.

To develop our students’ problem solving skills, our IB tutors would first show the student how to solve the different types of problems. Then, students would be given a chance to try questions on their own and our IB tutors would then help improve on their weaknesses.